However, author Charles Hatfield is looking to the future a bit differently with his scholarly Alternative Comics through which he hopes to legitimize comics’ past as a valid form of literary study. He states several times that his book is not the end-all and be-all of all independent comics study, but will hopefully successfully launch a wave of literary criticism in comics the way books without pictures have been studied.

The Writers collects interviews from The Comics Journal magazine–the premiere magazine for intellectual comic book dissection–conducted with the most influential comic writers from the second era (along with an exhaustive chat with celebrated author Harlan Ellison, who has always maintained a close relationship with comics even though he’s only written minimally for them).